See also ACX meetup groups’ ballot guides to Atlanta, Austin, Boston, the North Carolina Research Triangle, and San Francisco.
And effective altruist movement leadership tells me that their strongest opinion this year is to vote Scott Wiener for Congress in San Francisco. Wiener is a leader in AI safety and YIMBYism, and the California politics insiders I’ve talked to have been impressed by his intelligence, drive, and performance in Sacramento.
Here’s how I’m voting (Oakland, Alameda County, California):
Supporters claim it will build (or renovate) 40,000 homes; I asked an AI superforecaster1 to predict the true number, and it guessed that 22,000 would actually get built. That implies a cost of $500K per home, which would then be supplemented by state, local, and market funding for a total of $700K+ per affordable home. This is bad, albeit typical for California. Other things that turn me against this:
~5-10% will be spent on subsidizing demand, which will just drive up prices for everyone else.
~25% of the new homes are earmarked for specific groups like students, veterans, farm workers, and Native Americans, although this might not matter, since housing is fungible and those people will leave other houses that will then be available to the general public.
There are concerns that the government-sponsored-affordable-housing industry sometimes lobbies against market rate housing because it reduces the demand for government-sponsored affordable homes.
The AI superforecaster says that this would only decrease the cost of market-rate housing in California by 0.4%.
On the other hand, this is endorsed by CA YIMBY, YIMBY Action, and most other YIMBY groups, because we do need more housing. They claim this proposition is relatively well-designed by the low standards of California housing-related laws.
So it comes down to - given that California genuinely needs more homes, do we accept a standard California-style solution that gets those homes stupidly and expensively, or do we let the problem get worse in the hopes that maybe something magically changes later?
I weakly vote NO.
California makes much of its money by taxing the rich. The rich get much of their money from capital gains, which are high during booms and low during crashes. In 2014, California instituted a policy of saving money during booms that they could spend during the crashes, and this has gone well. But the original law was poorly designed and prevents the legislature from saving more than a certain amount, which was too low. Now they want permission to save a higher amount.
This seems like a rare bright spot of fiscal prudence. The opponents are mainly tax watchdogs who hope that if they make it harder for California to save money, California will have to give the money back to the taxpayers, which seems too galaxy-brained and irresponsible.
I vote * YES*.
They say nothing is as permanent as a temporary tax increase, and in 2012, California voted for a temporary tax increase on wealthy people. It expires in 2030, and oops, now our entire budget depends on it and if we ever got rid of it then the schools would crumble into dust and the health system would be entirely replaced by witch doctors and shamans.
I do feel sorry for California’s budgetary officials, because our proposition system is constantly banning various categories of tax, and then they have to make up for it with other, sneakier categories of tax, including temporary taxes that become permanent. I believe everyone who says this would be devastating for education and health care if this were were allowed to expire. And honestly, I’m just happy to get a proposition that technically doesn’t put a new tax on me.
I weakly vote * YES*.
California banned this practice in 1988, although the ban didn’t apply to a certain type of city called “charter cities” (not the same thing as Prospera-style charter cities) which includes Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland.
In the public funding model, candidates who get a certain number of small donors are eligible for public support for their campaigns, usually in the four-to-six digit dollar range. This supposedly makes it easier for ordinary people to compete with machine-backed candidates and billionaires. Opponents argue that taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize candidates they disagree with, and that these programs often become corrupt. Some considerations on this proposition:
It would probably cost about $75 million in extra local taxes, though not for me (Oakland already has this policy, so nothing would change).
It doesn’t invoke the state’s ethics watchdog, which would be the usual enforcer, strengthening concerns about local corruption. The
San Francisco Chronicleopposes iton this basis.Studies suggest that public financing programs like these cause more candidates to enter, but that these additional candidates don’t win. There is no evidence that they make the incumbent win less, or reduce donor power.
The main study which does find a change in winning candidates
finds thatit makes candidates more ideologically extreme, although other studiesdisagree.Cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland which currently have this policy under the charter city exemption don’t seem to be noticeably better.
The main countervailing consideration is that I don’t like when the state bans cities from trying things.
I weakly vote NO.
A recall election is like an impeachment by the voters. If enough voters sign a petition, there’s a special election where we vote to get rid of an official (most often the governor). This special election also includes a list of candidates for who replaces him if he does get recalled.
Proposition 5 would keep the recall vote, but instead of a simultaneous vote to replace the official, the official would be replaced according to normal procedure: a recalled governor would be replaced by the lieutenant governor, other major officials would be picked by the governor, and legislators would be replaced in a special election.
The current recall system tends toward the following annoying equilibrium: every election, California picks a mildly corrupt pro-dysfunctional-establishment Democrat; a year later, the Republicans object that the candidate is mildly corrupt and in bed with the dysfunctional establishment, and gather enough signatures to hold a recall election; a year after that, the election happens, everyone spends millions of dollars sending billions of spam email messages, and then it fails, because the electorate just got done electing the governor and hasn’t magically changed its mind.
This proposition might break the cycle: if the Republicans know with certainty that the mildly-corrupt-pro-establishment Democratic governor will just be replaced by the mildly-corrupt-pro-establishment Democratic lieutenant governor, maybe they’ll stop trying this. And it preserves the useful part of the recall system: if the governor ever crosses the line into being so crooked that people would genuinely prefer the mildly-corrupt-pro-establishment Democratic lieutenant governor, we can still recall him.
The main argument against is in the *San Francisco Chronicle: *Proposition 5 Has A Flaw So Bizarre Even Its Author Doesn’t Like It. The flaw is that it says that the recalled legislator can run in the special election to replace themselves.
This is particularly egregious because incumbents fighting recall attempts can generally raise unlimited funds through donors. Although state law prohibits that money from being used for other campaigns, a recalled official in a special election is unlikely to forget whatever limitless support they received from wealthy special interests.
According to the Chronicle, “[Proposition author Senator Josh] Newman himself couldn’t explain why Prop 5 contains that provision. ‘I’m honestly not sure,’ he said.”
I don’t have a strong opinion on this, so I will trust the Chronicle. I weakly vote NO**.**
I vote NO.
The great thing about California is that it’s not just a state where a few big special interests can money-pump the public. Anyone, no matter how small or humble, if they try hard and believe in themselves, can become a special interest that money-pumps the public.
Proposition 38 gives $8.4 billion of taxpayer money to immunology research, especially institutes that meet a list of qualifications. Only one institute meets the qualifications, and it’s the linked to the people backing this proposition. I see nothing else special about this research institute, and although immunology research in general is good, it’s not notably better than other good things that need money.
I strongly vote NO.
This is part of the national discussion about voter ID requirements. It mandates that California in-person voters show an ID, and that mail-in voters include the last four digits of an ID number (for example, Social Security).
There is generally little voter fraud in California elections. But this isn’t a law of nature: the last widely-agreed fraudulent US Congressional election was in 2018 (although it was discovered and the result was annulled), and part of the reason that elections are so clean is that past generations took fraud risk seriously. 36 US states and most other developed countries request or require an ID to vote, this is standard, and not doing so feels a little like refusing to lock your door because you’ve heard there isn’t much crime in your area. Election integrity worries many people, I don’t think they’re all operating in bad faith, and I’d like to give them fewer things to potentially start a civil war about.
I appreciate that some people are bad at getting IDs, but these people are presumably already locked out of driving, getting alcohol, buying guns, most banking, and all other ID-requiring activities. We’ve decided that keeping these things secure is important enough that it’s worth inconveniencing people who are bad at getting IDs, and I don’t think voting security is any less important.
Prop 39 opponents additionally argue that the proposition is bad insofar as it creates a “private right of action” - that is, private citizens can sue if they think their county isn’t complying with this, and maybe this would choke the court with frivolous lawsuits. Supporters argue that in a Democrat-controlled state like California, the election officials are never going to enforce this, so they need a way for someone else to do it. I asked the AI superforecaster how many groundless lawsuits it expected from this proposition (defined as “lawsuits that got dismissed”). It answered a median of 3, 90th percentile estimate of 8.
I weakly vote YES.
This is the best-known and most hotly-contested initiative this cycle. It imposes a “one-time” 5% wealth tax on billionaires to fund state programs, mostly health care. Celebrity left-wing economist Gabriel Zucman supports. Opponents say that nothing is as repetitive as a one-time wealth tax, that it distorts the economy by forcing founders to prematurely sell stakes in their companies, that it will make billionaires leave California, and that it’s a particularly egregious case of using private citizens as a piggy bank for randomly-selected nice-sounding causes. It’s also sponsored by the SEIU, which is notorious for sponsoring ballot initiatives to extort groups they don’t like.
I asked the AI superforecaster to predict the outcome. They said that it would produce about $60 billion in one-time revenues and make enough billionaires move away to decrease the state’s permanent tax base by $2 billion yearly, and that if it passed there was a 33% chance of another wealth tax passing by 2046.
These numbers are about midway between boosters’ claims and opponents’, but based on the arguments in the first paragraph and at the linked post, I still vote * NO*.
Voters like new taxes on billionaires, but hate new taxes on themselves. So a group of billionaires unhappy about the Proposition 40 billionaire wealth tax above figured they could write a proposition that sounds like it’s banning taxes in general - maybe even some especially dangerous and irresponsible form of taxes - but is mostly just banning Proposition 40. You don’t need to know what the Gann limit is except that Proposition 40 ignores it, and ignoring it sounds bad.
According to California law, if two mutually contradictory propositions pass during the same election cycle, whichever gets the most votes wins out. So if the voters who think that “taxes which ignore the Gann limit” sounds sinister outnumber the voters who think that “let’s seize the billionaires’ money” sounds fun, the wealth tax fails. Hooray for democracy!
I’m against the wealth tax, but this is kind of scummy. I weakly vote * NO*.
Just in case Proposition 41 didn’t work, they also sponsored Proposition 42, another one which secretly sinks the wealth tax. “Retroactive personal property tax” is just another name for a wealth tax. If more voters oppose wealth-taxes-under-another-name than support wealth taxes, the wealth tax measure will fail.
I was more tempted to support this one than Proposition 41, because banning future wealth taxes really does seem like a good idea (one major concern about Proposition 40 is that the specter of a recurring wealth tax, regardless of whether it happens, will drive away rich people and chill economic activity). But it turns out this doesn’t work; future California voters can always repeal propositions passed by past California voters with a 50% + 1 majority, so new wealth taxes will face no electoral hurdle. All this will do is cancel the Proposition 40 wealth tax from this current election.
I weakly vote * NO*.
Part of the eternal war between Californians voting for new taxes and Californians trying to ban themselves from voting for new taxes.
Although California does vote for too many new taxes, this law is an imposition of state power over local electorates, plus I will be voting for some of these ad hoc local taxes in this election (see Measure RTM), so it would be hypocritical of me to ban this.
I vote * NO*.
This one is this election cycle’s SEIU extortion attempt.
If you haven’t been following along, the SEIU-UHW is a California union infamous for demanding that people give them money and concessions, then, if they don’t, sponsoring ballot propositions that would destroy their business.
This time around, they demanded some loot from community health clinics, those clinics didn’t cave, and the result was this proposition.
I strongly vote * NO*.
This is t…
